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First stage POWER9 Firefox JIT passes tests
- nerdponx 5y agoWhat's the context for this? Is there a new JIT compiler for Javascript in Firefox? Or is it a 3rd-party "add-on" that improves performance on some specific machine that this company makes?
- aetherspawn 5y agoIt's JIT support for the OpenPOWER architecture, which is interesting, but as far as I can tell isn't exactly in wide use right now. At least not where you might need Firefox. https://openpowerfoundation.org/ https://openpowerfoundation.org/
- detaro 5y agoEDITED: derp, confused: There are POWER Workstations from Raptor Computing Systems (https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/). Talospace are POWER enthusiasts. Thanks amock for the correction.
- throwaway894345 5y agoHow do POWER CPUs compare with ARM, x86, etc?
- boibombeiro 5y agoThey are target at datacenters. The last iteration has hardware support to decimal floating point, flexible IO (DDR3, DDR4, DDR5. GDDR6, HBM, PCI5, nvlink), Cores with SMT8, Tbps intra chip network, etc Can change the endianess at run time. Their new cache architecture is very unusual. A CPU can use the cache from another chip. Data is stored encrypted.
- falcor84 5y agoIf the system can change the endianess at any time, does that mean that we should only be using palindromic data? Or is it that we should aim to make everything polyglotic such that both directions have valid but distinct interpretations? ;)
- jazzyjackson 5y agoyou joke but I learned at a talk comparing genetics to TCP networking (at HOPE, maybe 2014 or 2016, cant find it on the website atm) that DNA is encoded such that it expresses different proteins depending on which direction it is read, might be something to learn from
- bawolff 5y agoInteresting. What would the benefit be of changing endianess at runtime? From an efficiency perspective does that mean the chip has to do both so worst of both worlds? [I dont know much about the world of cpu design, these might be stupid questions]
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoIt's more something you'd do at boot, if you had to select between an OS built for one or another. The POWER ISA was used in PowerPC which was used for the successors of a few 68k machines (most famously the Macintosh) and in that case the OS was built for big-endian. So having big-endian support was key there.
- classichasclass 5y agoIBM i and AIX still run big, in fact. Important for IBM's institutional customers. As for endian shifts, technically every OpenPOWER chip goes big for every OPAL call into the low-level HAL, even if the OS is little. The overhead is minimal. I can't think of much application use for that, though (per-page endianness which some PowerPCs supported is much more useful).
- 5y ago
- amock 5y agoThe man behind talospace.com doesn't make workstations, he has one from https://raptorcs.com/ https://raptorcs.com/. He's a PowerPC enthusiast.
- thuccess129 5y agoIsn't a better allocation of scarce engineering resources on the POWER platform to implement a RDP client to x86 commodity desktop environment for the commercial consumer experience on the web with the benefit of offsetting and isolating potential security breach to that environment? Has anyone made the POWER CPU a raw node for crunching styled on the Plan 9 idea of cpu% ?
- josephg 5y agoI'm missing a lot of context. Can someone explain why POWER9 is interesting? Is OpenPOWER trying to compete with RISC-V? Whats the benefit compared to modern ARM or x86_64 silicon & ISAs?
- spijdar 5y agoPOWER9 is interesting (compared to RISC-V) because, right now, you can buy up to a 24 core, SMT4 system (96 threads), running dual CPU sockets if you like, and supporting up to 1 TB of memory per socket, with a maximum boosted clock speed of 3.8 GHz. All this with fully open firmware, and an open ISA (as of the last couple years). The CPU implementation itself is not open, but all firmware and procedures for initializing the CPU are open. For people interested in that sort of thing, it's appealing as a practical computer with a full PCIe implementation with actually decent performance, compared to essentially every other open source platform.
- classichasclass 5y agoIn fact, you could get a Talos II with dual 22-core CPUs for a whopping 176 threads, even. Raptor has them in stock.
- whatshisface 5y agoAre the prices of these CPUs comparable to x86 CPUs with similar performance?
- AnthonyMouse 5y agoIn a sense they are, because with those core counts, you're comparing to Epyc and Xeon, which are similarly very expensive. What they're really missing is a midrange product for a midrange price. I can't blame them for avoiding the low end, but can't I get anything for less than $2000?
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- tomrod 5y agoLikewise. I can tell the author is excited about it, but I don't have enough domain knowledge to understand the context. Is this a WASM extension?
- spijdar 5y agoThe first thing to know is there's a community of people using POWER9 workstations, whether for actual "work" or just as personal computers for, well, personal use. In both cases, web browsers are very important. These devices support basically all the DRM GPU drivers in Linux, and when coupled with Mesa, have very fast and responsive GUIs. Both Firefox and Chromium run well, but up until now, Firefox has been using a pure interpreter to run javascript. This is fine for sites not using much javascript, but a big chunk of the modern web quite literally loads megabytes worth of JS on a page, and it can really chug under the interpreter. So it's pretty exciting that we'll have a second browser with a proper JS engine, Chromium being the first (IBM ported V8 to ppc64le, for node.js, but the port works for running chromium as well) Also because it may not be clear, the other big arches all already have JIT compilers. x86, amd64, 32 and 64 bit ARM, (and I think MIPS does, on either chromium or firefox, don't recall), so this is less about boosting performance, and more about reaching "baseline expected performance".
- classichasclass 5y agoMIPS has a JIT on both, though it's mipsle, not "classic" BE MIPS like sgimips. It's more targeted to CPUs like Loongson. Anyway, I'm trying to go as fast as I can to get an actual browser mounted. But passing the test suites in totality, run two different ways, suggests a high probability of success at this point.
- spijdar 5y agoGreatly looking forward to it. Thanks for all your work on Firefox and PowerPC at-large. Being able to use Firefox for the JS heavy sites I've had to use Chromium for will be very, very nice. :-)
- amock 5y agoThis is very exciting. The missing JIT has made web browsing much less pleasant than it should be and is currently the the only significant issue I have with my POWER9 workstation.
- classichasclass 5y agoHey, thanks!
- HerbsMan 5y agoMy Quad G5 can't wait to take a ride :)
- jjcon 5y agoAnyone want to Hollywood movie, “in English please” this for me? If it is at the top of HN I feel like I should understand the significance more.
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- PaulBGD_ 5y agoPOWER9 is a family of processors. This is an announcement that Firefox's coding engine (for JavaScript) can run this code fast on those processors. It's somewhat interesting because OPENPOWER is a competitive alternative to Intel/AMD's processor architecture, and also ARM (used mostly in mobile.)
- Zardoz84 5y agoIt makes JavaScript in Firefox running on IBM POWER9'S CPUs faster.
- sneeeeeed 5y agoIntel just got BTFO.
- DeathArrow 5y agoSince POWER9 and OpenSPARC are open architectures with open ISAs, I don't see why companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba aren't using them and trying instead to build CPUs based on ARM. Is there a much better performance/power ration which can be achieved by ARM and not by POWER or SPARC?
- PedroBatista 5y agoWith ARM you have a World of resources, with POWER or SPARC you have 2 abandoned platforms. There’s a reason they are “open” now and nobody wants to hold that bag.
- broodbucket 5y agoPOWER definitely isn't abandoned lol, POWER10 shipped last month.
- PedroBatista 5y agoThen SPARC isn't abandoned either, but I think you know what I meant compared to ARM.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoEr, when did SPARC last have a new version?
- PedroBatista 5y ago2017 or 2018 I think, but Fujitsu was going to release a new version this year.
- hulitu 5y agoWith ARM you have a world of blobs.
- fomine3 5y ago
- bschne 5y agoBetween the various keywords in the title and the domain, it took me about a minute and a resigned click to figure out whether this was about browsers or rockets
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- marcodiego 5y agoIs there a surplus/used market where one can buy a talos II for a better price?
- theodric 5y agoGreat work, but since (A) at the very least my every attempt to buy a POWER9 system has been thwarted, mainly by the manufacturer themselves constraining availability or otherwise being unable to supply, and (B) POWER10 has IP issues that have made it unattractive to Raptor CS, and (C) they have in the past made noises about it not being worth the effort to continue to sell POWER9 systems to the public because of the support overhead ...I have to ask if this is effort well-spent, or if the sweat would be better poured into something with a more certain future. Not that RISC-V boards currently are anywhere near fast enough for daily driver use, but I'm leaning in that direction.
- classichasclass 5y agoAuthor here. For me it's well spent, since this is my daily desktop driver. I can't comment on (C) or (A), though I agree (B) is a problem. But while RISC-V has a "future" (or at least a more distributed one) I see no system currently or in the near future that's anywhere in the same performance ballpark. The architecture has a lot of potential but it feels to me like it remains unrealized. OpenPOWER exists today in competitive specifications and notwithstanding supply chain issues, you can get one (I have three).
- gautamcgoel 5y agoWhat are the IP issues related to POWER10? I hadn't heard about it.
- classichasclass 5y agoThe memory controllers required by OMI and one of the on-chip I/O processors (possibly for PCIe). Both are only available as blobs: https://www.talospace.com/2021/09/its-not-just-omi-thats-trouble-with.html https://www.talospace.com/2021/09/its-not-just-omi-thats-tro...